Building upgrades

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Contents

Summary

Here the different types of how buildings can be upgraded are sketched. Upgrades can affect any of graphics, production or storage enhancements as well as cause negative changes, f.e. running costs increase. They never affect the size or type of a building! See Morphing Buildings for this.

Detailed Description

Much of this is derived from a discussion focussing on the upgrading process of the fisher, for which a summary exists.

There are currently three kinds of building upgrades we agreed on:

Automatic upgrades with building costs

Residents will always upgrade automatically at a cost of certain resources when their demands are fulfilled.

The upgrade will always affect capacities (max. amount of inhabitants, max. inventory space) and the graphics of building and unit.

The amount of resources available for the upgrade can be specified by the player.

This kind of updates is limited to residents (and road constructor).

It can possibly be prohibited by an island-wide setting of Lock Construction Materials or similar.

At the moment, it is not planned to have a button like Level up now for housings in that case.

We want the player, if regulation is wanted, to do so by playing with the range of necessary buildings rather than allowing picky plans to be successful at any place and time.

Manual islandwide upgrades (GUI menu)

Buildings like branch office and storage can/need to be upgraded manually at a cost of certain resources.

Such upgrades will improve the buildings in some way and may also affect the building graphics.

In order to upgrade all buildings of one class on a certain island, you need to buy the corresponding upgrades in the menu Research and Upgrade (accessible via GUI).

These upgrades will apply to all current and future buildings of a certain type of than island. Think of a plan for a new machine that exists, which every building will build for itself to increase it's own productivity at zero additional cost, once it has been developed.

We can still discuss whether you buy one "level" upgrading all buildings, only one class of those upgrades or even provide both options.

Another point of discussion is: Should we also allow upgrades for service or production buildings (like additional capacity, production speed, collectors and so on)?

Automatic upgrades without building costs

Service and production buildings can upgrade automatically without the cost of additional resources.

This upgrade affects building graphics only and should be realised as a new building replacing the old one.

Thus, you are able to codewise check for some specific level of a building easier.

This is already implemented. Add features you want additionally below this line.

Implementation

We need a menu Research and Upgrade where the possible upgrades can be bought.

Hovering them could show the res_subtract row as it would happen with building normally.

A short tooltip states the changed stats / new features available after upgrading.

The Road Constructor needs to be able to automatically upgrade roads in its range (for some fixed percentage a bit below 100% of that new road's building costs), so he has an auto-upgrade with resources, too.

Open questions

IRC

14JUL10

2010-07-14T00:07:48 <dauerflucher> residents automatically update as long as resources are available (option to restrict)

2010-07-14T00:08:09 <dauerflucher> manual updates are all done via research&upgrade menu: upgrades only work for one settlement while research is for all

2010-07-14T00:09:25 <dauerflucher> all other buildings update at no costs (just gfx, capacities via research&upgrades), to clarify... a lumberjack will never update to a saw mill

2010-07-14T00:10:03 <eoc> well, for mines and pits I'm rather sure that manual upgrades could be nice too... but for now that's okay